Happy belated 21st birthday to me! Through the power of prayer and the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I was reborn into the kingdom of God in 1996. “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:23 NIV). In January of that year, my former partner died of HIV/AIDS. That occurrence was a milestone in my life. It jolted me into a time to reflect on my life and realize that I was truly sick and tired of the homosexual lifestyle.

Trusting that God really is good and has my good in mind is tough when I think through a past devastated by a broken marriage and a year of deep depression and a future that may include divorce, single parenting, and financial difficulty. Oh, I know God CAN bring a change to my circumstances, but in those moments I am really doubtful that God WOULD do that or even WANTS to do that. He seems unloving and even selfish.

I must confess that I sometimes wonder if much of the Church even really cares. I see our participants as some of the great heroes of our time because they are choosing to follow JESUS rather than the longings of their flesh even in the face of much suffering. And yet many Christians rarely even think about what our participants face every day. Let me share a little of what many of us experience regularly.

From the very first time I heard Jeremy Camp’s song Slow Fade, I knew it was one hundred percent true. At the same time, in the back of my mind, deep down, I also thought, “That will never happen to me; I am too aware, too present.” As cliché as it sounds, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The song’s chorus goes like this:

Each of us were born dead and we inherited this condition from Adam. We call this the “sin nature” . . . “being in Adam” and it is a result of the Fall . . . Original Sin (Genesis 3). As a result all humanity was separated from GOD and cut off from His acceptance. And as a result of the Fall every person is in need of redemption . . . salvation . . . being restored to a relationship with GOD as He intended from the very beginning of time.